Page:The History of Liberty.djvu/31

  and principles by which her character, and deeds were to be measured and determined; and just so with Liberty.—She too will furnish her own maxims and principles by which to be justified in all she has done, is doing, and will hereafter do.

When St. Paul with his accustomed boldness and honesty preached against the idolatry and superstition in the voluptuous city of Ephesus, what a storm of opposition was raised around him. And had Paal, and the cause of Christianity depended for their safety and tolerance upon the maxims and principles of Diana and her worshippers, there would have been a speedy end to the existence of both. “By these things we have our living”, exclaimed the shrine makers of that goddess as they saw that their craft was in danger from the new doctrines they heard. It was a strong appeal, a powerful argument; enlisting all the principles of local justice and prudential policy; an argument and appeal which from that day to this has sustained every species of political fraud, injustice and oppression; and with which tyrants and diplomatists gild their systems, to gull confiding fools. But Christianity and Liberty are not cheated by such arguments: they scatter the illusions that conceal the folly, wrong and iniquity of these things and establish truth, honor, and wisdom in their place, and make the many—not the few the recipients of their bounty.

And now in conclusion;

Young Gentlemen; as a nation, the missionaries of truth and Liberty to the world, we have a high, a mighty, and a most glorious destiny to fulfil; and we must meet it. High and honorable is our vocation as a people, and we must respond to it, in the spirit of a deep, solemn and awful responsibility. What friend of Liberty, what American can look upon the present state of the world without feeling the most intense anxieties and emotions for the development of those mighty events which age rapidly hurrying on to their consummation. And as he withdraws his anxious gaze from the old world, on which clouds of doubt and darkness, fear and trembling hang; and around the whole horizon of which storms and tempests begin to gather and rise; when he directs his eye to his own fair and happy country, what emotions of gratitude, pride and joy must swell in his bosom as he surveys the whole moral and political landscape of his country spreading away in beauty, grandeur and prosperity as the expanding horizon, illumined by the light of truth and Liberty extends itself over another and another domain